What are you doing for him now-- any therapies in place outside of school? Does he have any formal diagnosis? Who is evaluating him now-- do they specialize in ASDs? We found that people who were not autism specialists were very poorly equipped to identify ASD in a gifted child-- they tended to brush our DS off as "quirky," just because his verbal abilities masked his disability, which sounds similar to what has happened to your DS.
I would approach this two ways: put key therapies into place outside school, while also working to get both gifted and special ed working for him in school. 8 is not too late to remediate fine motor skills with OT, either, and school should provide this if there is a documented need. You likely have to start over with the school, formally request an evaluation in writing, listing everything he struggles with and all the areas you want evaluated. There are sample letters in the book From Emotions to Advocacy.
For outside school, our family has done very well with ABA therapy: it is tailored individually, so there is no difficulty working with a gifted/ASD child. They have remediated all sorts of things for our DS10, from shoe tying to social skills to losing gracefully to conversational skills to being flexible when things don't go your way to handwriting.
You may also want to ask around the parent forum at at aspergersyndrome.org -- some good, expert parents over there.
DeeDee
